Only a couple of weeks to go before I meet you all at the Community Circle Event in Orlando Florida. I will meet you all, right? You just have to come: in two days you will learn more than you could learn in two years on your own. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then lecture demos are worth a thousand books!

I can hardly wait to fly to sunny Florida. And waiting for that sun here in the grey, misty and snowy Holland, I thought up a quick and easy project: a lamp shade.

Instead of blogging away here, I will just let the photos do most of the talking for this "craft" project:

Start in Pre-Design Studio and draw a flower, swirls, spirals, border scalops, anything you like.Resize so it will fit the hoop you are going to use (I used my clamp hoop 100x180 mm - 4x7 inch).I made two drawings, one including the pattern piece of the lamp shade and another one with just the rose to embroider.

Choose menu File > Convert to Stitches, use the settings shown below:

Save the resulting DST on a USB thumb drive and insert it into your embroidery machine.

If you have the clamp hoop, just put the coverboard sheet between top and bottom hoop and close the hoop. For other hoops: cut the plastic material in exactly the shape of the inner hoop and just lay it inside that inner hoop.

Embroider the DST design: no top or bobbin thread. Use a needle size 100/16. IMPORTANT: hold the start button of your machine to stitch the design at a real low speed of 1 stitch per second. That way you get perfect holes:

Print the design from Pre-Design Studio, and use as a pattern to cut the plastic shade pieces:

Punch holes in the sides:

Sew the pieces together (yes, by hand) with a big decorative chain stitch:

A little extra light, to brighten the days until we're in Florida

Done! I'm all set to start making notes for the next project in my little Moleskine notebook.

See you soon!

Loes

P.S. with all these crazy projects I am making these days, I hope you do know that Pre-Design Studio is meant to create artwork for embroidery digitizing software, don't you?

In my next blog I will make a mini tutorial how to use my Pre-Design Studio and Brother's PE-Design Lite together - the two programs are a match made in heaven. Together with Pre-Design Studio, PE-Design Lite can do things it normally can't. I will show this in detail in Florida as well.

I am looking forward to meeting you too! My first goal is to make everyone at the Community Circle happy with their digitizing software with lots of exciting ideas. My second goal is to turn you into a digitizer